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Concourse Usage: 2017

Syllabus Geek

January 31, 2018 08:47

Updated

To help you interpret the Concourse Usage Report for your organization, we've put together some aggregate statistics and commentary regarding the usage of Concourse across our entire network. The following covers the 2017 calendar year.

Audience

Timing: Peak usage remains Mondays, though the percentage has dropped to just above 20% of weekly activity. Traffic in January and August is nearly three times that of the rest of the year.

Behavior: Concourse is well loved. Nearly 30% of users used our system at least 10 times throughout the year. More than 60k Concourse groupies visited over 100 times! And to the person who came 3,268 times, you definitely get a gold star.

Geography: Concourse has now reached 215 countries and territories (what are you waiting for Svalbard and Jan Mayen Islands?). Over 90% of traffic comes from within the United States, where the majority of our schools reside, though kudos to one of our US-based clients for deriving nearly 25% of their views from other countries.

Devices: Desktop dominance continues to fall, which now stands at 78% of usage as compared to last years' 84%. Almost all of the difference was taken up by mobile. Apple's iPhone still leads, accounting for more than half of mobile usage.

Operating Systems: Windows held steady at 62%, but it seems many people traded their iMacs for iPhone and iPads. Macintosh fell to below 17% of usage, but iOS increased to 15%. Chrome OS has now broken past 1% of users, and we expect this to continue to rise.

Browsers/Versions: The Chrome browser has almost reached half of our usage (47%). Maybe in 2018? Safari is still solid at 19%. Edge "edges" up to now be over 6% of usage, though Internet Explorer 11 still represents 13% of traffic. It is likely we will drop support for IE 8 and 9 this year as these now account for less than 1 out of every 1000 visits.

Acquisition

Sources: The LMS as a point of Concourse entry continues to gain popularity, now reaching almost 85% of visits. As a result direct traffic (visiting the site without starting at another page, such as bookmarks, email, etc.) has fallen to 13%. Google searches shuttled nearly 40k people to Concourse last year.

Referrals: Apidapter remains the predominant referrer, directing over 75% of all Concourse traffic. For many Apidapter has become the sole gateway to reaching Concourse at their institution. Our most active adapter handled just shy of 1m LTI launches.

Behavior

Content: View syllabus was, unsurprisingly, the most viewed page, reaching 74.3% of all traffic, a 1.3% increase over last year. We surmise this is just about the upper limit as other pages are still necessary (e.g. edit, search, index) for the creation and management of such syllabi and that almost all of our clients are now integrated with their LMS. Search fell to 11.3% of traffic, with edit syllabus standing at 2.5%.

Duration: Users are now spending 4 seconds longer viewing syllabi, averaging 209 seconds in 2017. Viewing syllabi from 9-10PM takes the number up to 236 seconds. Just two hours later, from 11-12AM, and the time on task drops to 193 seconds. Think about it, that means students are more than 20% more attentive if they look at a syllabus earlier in the evening!

Events: Concourse syllabi are edited a lot, almost a million times. Among all these edits, the volume is highly concentrated to the weeks before and after the term starts. Just like holiday shopping, 40% of yearly syllabus edits occur during these two, three-week windows.

Other Notes

This information does not include users who have not enabled JavaScript, those who use AdBlockers, or disable Google Analytics. Our best estimate is that this segment of users may be as high as 5%.